LOS ANGELES  Smoking isn't only bad for your health. If you're a filmmaker, it may be bad for your movie.

The Motion Picture Association of America said Thursday that it would scrutinize smoking more closely as part of its ratings criteria.

Underage smoking has always been considered behavior that could warrant a tougher rating, the MPAA said in its release. Now, "all smoking will be considered and depictions that glamorize smoking or … feature pervasive smoking outside of an historic or other mitigating context" could warrant a more prohibitive rating, the organization said.

The MPAA has been under increasing fire to revamp its ratings criteria, particularly involving smoking. The San Francisco-based center Smoke Free Movies claims that movies are responsible for 5,000 smoking-related deaths a month that might have been prevented by an R rating. The group also says movies are responsible half of the 800,000 children a year who start smoking.

"They're pretending to solve the problem," says Stanton Glantz, head of the group and a professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco. "We believe an automatic R for a movie with smoking — unless you're showing someone getting sick from it — could save thousands of lives."

The MPAA disputes those figures, though its own research suggests that smoking is prevalent on the big screen. According to an MPAA study of all movies rated over the past four years — roughly 3,400 movies — 57% contained scenes of smoking. Of that 57%, roughly 75% were rated R, the MPAA says.

"Clearly, smoking is increasingly an unacceptable behavior in our society," MPAA chief Dan Glickman said in the release. "The appropriate response of the rating system is to give more information to parents on this issue."

Although the MPAA said that scenes of smoking would not warrant an automatic R, Glickman said the organization will consider three questions in considering giving a movie a tougher rating: whether the smoking is pervasive; if the movie glamorizes smoking; and if there is an historic or other mitigating context for the smoking.

When a movie's rating is affected by smoking, the MPAA said, the rating will include phrases such as "glamorized smoking" or "pervasive smoking."

Although some filmmakers have been critical of the board's treatment of adult content such as sex, the Directors Guild of America issued a press release Thursday supporting the MPAA's announcement.

"We appreciate that they, like us, are working to find the delicate balance between addressing important health concerns and safeguarding free expression."

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